Perceptions of auditor independence: U.K. evidence

The reality and perception of auditor independence is fundamental to public confidence in financial reporting. A new Independence Standards Board was set up in the U.S. in 1997 and the European Union (EU) is currently seeking to establish a common core of independence principles. The general setting within which audit decisions are made and independence perceptions are formed is evolving rapidly due to competitive and regulatory changes. Policy-makers must work continuously to evaluate the critical threat factors and develop appropriate independence principles. This paper explores the potential of recent regulatory reforms in the United Kingdom (U.K.), many of which are unique to that country, to strengthen the independence framework. Using a questionnaire instrument, U.K. interested parties’ perceptions of the influence on auditor independence of a large set of 45 economic and regulatory factors are elicited. Most factors have a significant impact on independence perceptions for all groups (finance directors, audit partners, and financial journalists). The principal threat factors relate to economic dependence and non-audit service provision, while the principal enhancement factors relate to regulatory changes introduced in the early 1990s (the existence of an audit committee, the risk of referral to the Financial Reporting Review Panel and the risk to the audit firm of loss of Registered Auditor status). Exploratory factor analysis reduces the factor set to a smaller number of uncorrelated underlying dimensions.     

审计委员会-会计师事务所连锁关系与审计调整

本文运用我国独到的审计调整数据,研究审计委员会-会计师事务所连锁关系对审计质量的影响问题.研究发现,审计委员会-会计师事务所连锁关系能够提高审计调整的概率,这一结果在控制内生性和排除潜在替代性解释之后仍然成立,表明审计委员会-会计师事务所连锁关系能够促进审计委员会与会计师事务所之间的信息共享,从而提高审计质量.研究还发现,审计委员会-会计师事务所连锁关系对审计调整概率的提升效应,在机构投资者持股和管理层持股的公司以及国内会计师事务所中更为明显.进一步的研究发现,连锁的审计委员会成员为审计委员会主任时,上述效应更为明显;而连锁的审计委员会成员是否为独立董事对结果没有明显的影响.     

The interaction effects of firm and partner tenure on audit quality†

This paper investigates the impact of firm and partner tenure on audit quality, where audit quality is proxied by discretionary accruals. We study a sample of Spanish listed companies between 2005 and 2011 and address both the individual and the interaction effects of firm and partner tenure. Our study is motivated by the current debate, particularly intense at the EU level, on the impact of the auditor rotation regime on the quality of auditing. We find that, without considering the interaction effects, firm and partner tenure do not seem to play a relevant role as determinants of audit quality. Importantly, the interaction of firm and partner tenure shows stronger effects on audit quality than both forms of tenure separately considered. Finally, our analysis suggests that audit quality is maximized when medium firm and partner tenures interact. However, results for the interaction variables are sensitive to the accruals estimation method.     

An international study of internal audit function quality

We investigate organisational and environmental factors that influence firms’ incentives to develop high-quality internal audit functions (IAFs) by using a unique international sample formed by matching proprietary data from a global internal auditor survey with public data obtained from Worldscope. Concerning organisational factors, we find that a positive relationship exists between IAF quality and firm complexity and confirm that complex firms have a higher demand for monitoring and advising and, therefore, a greater need for formal controls. In addition, IAF quality is positively related to board monitoring and audit committee diligence but negatively associated with CEO power, which suggests that IAF quality is influenced by other key players in corporate governance. Regarding environmental factors, we document that IAF quality is positively associated with industry competition, which implies that a firm’s incentive for a high-quality IAF is enhanced when confronted with greater environmental uncertainty. Furthermore, IAF quality has a significantly positive relationship with our self-constructed index of IAF requirements included in national corporate governance codes, which indicates that strong home-country corporate governance codes play a role in fostering IAF development.     

Explanations for Not Having an Audit Committee in a ‘Comply or Explain’ Regime

We utilise the Australian ‘comply or explain’ corporate governance regime to examine the explanations given for not having an audit committee and whether these explanations are consistent with underlying firm characteristics. We hand‐collect explanations provided by firms, and find the most common explanations are that the firm or board size is too small or that the firm is insufficiently complex to justify an audit committee. Thus, the reasons that firms provide for not having an audit committee are focused on internal factors limiting their ability to supply an audit committee. As we find that these explanations are associated with lower total assets, smaller board size and lower leverage, they are consistent with underlying firm characteristics. Thus firms are not providing inconsistent or unrelated explanations as pretexts to avoid forming an audit committee. Documenting that the explanations given for non‐compliance are associated with related firm characteristics should be of interest to regulators and policy makers.     

Audit Firm Tenure,Non‐Audit Services,and Internal Assessments of Audit Quality

We use data from internal assessments of audit quality in a Big 4 firm to investigate the impact of audit firm tenure and auditor‐provided non‐audit services (NAS) on audit quality. We find that first‐year audits receive lower assessments of audit quality and that quality improves shortly thereafter and then declines as tenure becomes very long. Partitioning our sample between SEC registrants and private clients, we find that the decline in audit quality in the long tenure range is attributable to audits of private clients. For audits of SEC registrants, the probability of a high quality audit reaches its maximum with very long tenure. We also find that audit fees are discounted for first‐year audits but auditor effort is higher than in subsequent years. We find no association, on average, between total NAS fees and audit quality in the full sample but observe that total NAS fees are positively associated with quality for SEC registrants and negatively associated with quality for privately held clients. Our findings are important for regulatory policies related to audit firm tenure and auditor‐provided NAS.     

审计独立性的影响要素及措施分析

在资本市场迅猛发展的今天,审计独立性问题引起越来越多人的关注.审计的独立不仅会影响注册会计师的职业判断及审计质量,还会增加投资者对审计报告的期望度.而审计失败则将会损害审计的内在价值及执行审计任务的会计师事务所的声誉,甚至资本市场的稳定.本文主要从资本市场及公司治理结构分析审计独立性的影响要素,并结合西方国家先进的观点及普遍做法,提出几点提高审计独立性的改进意见     

Audit committee composition and the use of an industry specialist audit firm

Independent, competent boards of directors and audit committees are said to be important mechanisms of corporate governance. The purpose of the present study is to empirically examine the association between audit committee composition and audit quality. Specifically, the link between the proportion of non‐executive directors on an audit committee, financial qualifications of directors and the number of audit committee meetings held in a year are investigated and expected to have a positive association with the quality of the audit firm used. Audit quality is proxied by industry specialization. The results support the link between a higher proportion of non‐executive directors on an audit committee and use of an industry specialist audit firm. Other measures of audit committee quality (those with a higher proportion of directors with financial qualifications and those that meet more frequently) are not significantly associated with the use of an industry specialist audit firm. Sensitivity analysis shows that the presence of an audit committee is linked to use of an industry specialist audit firm.     

Audit committee equity holdings,the risk of reporting problems,and the achievement of earnings thresholds

There is conflicting evidence on whether audit committee equity holdings enhance or undermine committee effectiveness. Some researchers contend that equity holdings motivate audit committees to minimize the risk of reporting problems, while others believe equity holdings align the committees’ incentives with management. To reconcile these seemingly contradictory positions, I hypothesize that the influence of audit committee equity holdings depends upon the risk of reporting problems. I contend that when the risk of reporting problems is low (high) equity holdings motivate audit committees to give managers greater (less) discretion over reporting policies because the expected benefits from giving the discretion is greater (less) than the expected cost of the reporting problems that might occur from giving the discretion. I test whether the influence of audit committee equity holdings varies with the risk of reporting problems using a sample of 1370 firm-observations with earnings near the prior year’s earning level and a sample of 2389 firm-observations near analyst forecasts. I find the influence of audit committee equity holdings on the likelihood that a firm meets the prior year’s earnings level varies with the CEO’s equity incentives and the level of high-risk assets. I also find the influence of audit committee equity holdings on the likelihood that a firm meets analysts’ forecast varies with the CEO’s equity incentives and the effectiveness of internal controls. Collectively, my results suggest equity holdings enhance audit committee effectiveness by increasing a committee’s responsiveness to risk factors.     

Audit committee quality indices,reporting quality and firm value

We investigate the relation between audit committee (AC) quality indices, financial reporting, internal control quality and firm value using a US dataset for the period 2002–12. The indices are developed by linking firm value with principal component analysis (PCA) factors based on a broad set of 82 AC variables, some of which influence the quality of the AC, but are not addressed in prior literature. Significant AC factors include ‘overlapping directors’, ‘busyness’ and ‘foreign director’, and we use these factors to develop ‘high’ and ‘low’ AC quality indices. We show that low AC quality firms are more likely to manage earnings, be external auditor dependent with respect to non‐audit tax services, and switch to a lower quality auditor. Low AC quality firms are also more likely to have internal control concerns disclosed by predecessor auditors, including accounting issues, financial restatements, audit opinion concerns and deficiencies that undermine internal control effectiveness. Further, they are more likely to receive an audit report containing additional explanatory notes. Conversely, high AC quality firms are significantly less likely to have these concerns. Our findings highlight the value of using AC quality indices in delivering greater oversight of the financial reporting process.     

Lead independent directors and accruals quality

We investigate the association between firms having a lead independent director (LID) who serves on the audit committee and accruals quality using a sample of 32,346 observations during 2001–2018 period. Our results suggest that firms with an LID who serves on the audit committee are associated with higher accruals quality. The results suggest that these firms are associated with an increase in accruals quality equal to 6.60% of the accruals quality metric's median value. We also find that as board size increases, the positive influence of an LID on accruals quality weakens—but only for firms with an LID who does not serve on the audit committee. Supplemental analyses indicate that our inferences still hold when using a changes model, when examining a firm's initial adoption or elimination of the LID position, and when using an entropy balancing approach.     

The Role of Risk Management and Governance in Determining Audit Demand

Abstract:  Most prior research into audit fees has been based on a theoretical model which treats audit fees as the by-product of a production function ignoring potential demand forces that may drive the level of the audit fee. Inspired by prior 'anomalous' results, we take a different perspective by focusing on demand factors that may affect the level of the audit fee. Using data collected from a sample of listed companies in Belgium, we consider both disclosures about risk and risk management and actual decisions about corporate governance to examine whether audit fees are higher when these demand forces exist. In general, we expect that external auditing will increase in situations where there are multiple stakeholders with individual risk profiles who can shift some of the cost of monitoring to other stakeholders. Consistent with our theory and expectations, our results indicate that audit fees are higher when a company has an audit committee, discloses a relatively high level of financial risk management, and has a larger proportion of independent Board Members. Audit fees are lower when a company discloses a relatively high level of compliance risk management. The latter result indicates that controls are only complementary as long as they are voluntary, as mandated controls act as substitutes for non-mandated controls.     

On the Relationship between Audit Tenure and Fees Paid to the Audit Firm and Audit Quality

Abstract

We investigate the impact of audit firm tenure, partner tenure, audit fees, fees for non-audit services and total fees on audit quality, as measured by discretionary accruals. Our sample consists of Spanish non-financial public companies for the years between 2006 and 2013. Results indicate that audit quality increases with audit firm tenure but decreases with partner tenure. Moreover, the level of fees paid to the audit firm seems to have a negative impact on audit quality, which is mainly driven by fees for audit services. In this regard, we do not observe any significant relationship between fees for non-audit services and audit quality. Our results also show that the negative relationship between either long partner tenures or high fees and audit quality does not occur when the tenure with the audit firm is long. Therefore, long audit firm tenures do not only seem to involve higher audit quality ‘per se’, but also moderate the negative effects of partner tenure and audit fees on audit quality. The results of this study, which are robust to several sensitivity checks, may be relevant for the current debate on auditor rotation and the joint provision of audit and non-audit services.     

The Unintended Consequences of the Frequency of PCAOB Inspection

After more than 50 years of self‐regulation of the US auditing profession, the Sarbanes‐Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) created the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) as a quasi‐governmental entity with statutory authority to inspect accounting firms that audit public clients. The frequency of this inspection is annual or triennial, based upon the number of public clients the firm audits. We examine the effects of these two levels of inspection frequency on financial reporting quality and audit fees for clients of small and midsize public accounting firms. Our findings provide evidence of significantly higher audit quality and audit fees for clients of annually inspected firms relative to clients of triennially inspected firms. These findings are robust to auditor‐client alignment analyses, propensity score matching, time‐series analyses, examination of firms that have changed from triennial to annual inspection, and particular examination of firms with inspection deficiencies. Overall, our study suggests that the two‐tier frequency system of PCAOB inspection may have also resulted in two‐tier audit quality and audit fee systems for small and midsize public accounting firms, with more frequent inspection leading to more rigorous and informed auditor decisions. We discuss the implications of our results for the Board and the profession at large.     

Innate and discretionary accruals quality and corporate governance

This paper extends previous research on the association between corporate governance mechanisms and accruals quality. We derive measures of the discretionary and innate components of accruals quality and regress them against corporate governance characteristics. For discretionary accruals, we find use of a Big 4 audit firm and a larger audit committee as the primary governance mechanisms associated with higher accruals quality. For innate accruals quality, we find that higher quality is associated with an independent board of directors, a larger, more independent and more active audit committee, and use of a Big 4 audit firm. Our findings suggest a stronger relation between sound governance mechanisms and innate accruals quality than discretionary accruals quality.     

Female audit committee members and their influence on audit fees

We test the relationship between female representation on the audit committee and audit fees for 624 Australian companies in the year 2011. A positive relationship is found, leading to the conclusion that female presence on audit committees influences the quality of the external audit. Further, we find that gender is the significant audit committee characteristic in predicting audit quality and that women on the audit committee strengthen the positive relationship between firm size and audit fees, and between risk and audit fees. Conversely, we find that female representation dampens the positive relationship between complexity and audit fees.     

Do Joint Audits Improve or Impair Audit Quality?

Conventional wisdom holds that joint audits would improve audit quality by enhancing audit evidence precision because “Two heads are better than one.” Our paper challenges this wisdom. We show that joint audits by one big firm and one small firm may impair audit quality, because, in that situation, joint audits induce a free‐riding problem between audit firms and reduce audit evidence precision. We further derive a set of empirically testable predictions comparing audit evidence precision and audit fees under joint and single audits. This paper, the first theoretical study of joint audits, contributes to a better understanding of the economic consequences of joint audits on audit quality.     

The audit expectation gap: existence,causes, and the impact of changes

Recent regulatory initiatives targeting the statutory audit regime support the notion that the audit expectation gap is still a driver of change. This study seeks to analyse causes of the gap as well as the impact of proposed changes to the current statutory audit regime using an approach that differs from those used in prior literature. This approach allows us to attribute the audit expectation gap under the current regime to a failure of the public, the standard-setter, or the auditor. Based on a questionnaire survey conducted in 2011 in Germany, we find the public to have exaggerated expectations of auditors' responsibilities under current standards. Other causes of the gap relate to the public's difficulty in assessing the performance of auditors, but also to deficiencies in auditors' performance. In addition, we find that auditors are not fully aware of their responsibilities. Increasing the information content of the audit opinion is expected to narrow the gap. By contrast, recent proposed changes, such as mandatory rotation and a ban on non-audit services, may reduce the gap only to a lesser extent. Overall, it can be shown that the audit expectation gap is by its nature a persistent phenomenon comprising complex social aspects and interactions with changing accounting requirements, such as increased uncertainties in accounting estimates.     

Are fully independent audit committees really necessary?

Accounting scandals and concerns about the quality of financial statements have led to many calls for improved audit committee effectiveness. Prior research indicates that audit committee independence is positively related to effective oversight of the financial reporting process. Unfortunately, prior research has not provided an answer as to how much independence on the audit committee is enough. This is an important unanswered question because while Section 301 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) currently requires all listed companies to maintain an audit committee that is 100% independent there has been much debate regarding easing the SOX requirements for smaller and foreign companies. In this paper we examine whether the regulatory requirements of a completely independent audit committee are necessary to obtain the monitoring benefits related to audit committee independence that have been documented in prior literature. Our results suggest that the benefits of audit committee independence are consistently achieved only when the audit committee is completely independent. These results provide support for the SOX requirement of 100% independent audit committees.